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Soon Duke and his friends were playing for private affairs and dances at Washington's True Reformers Hall. A musical contractor arranged bookings in return for half of the fees. Duke noticed that the contractor got his business from a small ad in the classified phone book, so the boy took an ad himself, and he clicked. After that he never had to split his fees. Before long he had a house, a car, a wife and a son, Mercer. But his musical friends all moved to New York, where the jazz was hot. Duke followed in 1922, though it meant a fresh start, many penniless months, and a separation from his wife that became permanent.
Lucky Six. "A pal and I used to go see Willie The Lion at his club—the Capitol Palace—and Fats Waller at the Orient, and they'd let us sit in and cut in on the tips," Duke recalls. "Every day we'd go play pool until we made $2. With $2 we'd get a pair of 75¢ steaks, beer for a quarter, and have a quarter left for tomorrow." He did his own housework, including mending and pressing his tailor-made suits, always impeccably kept. Periodically, there was work for his five-man combo—Arthur Whetsel on trumpet, Otto Hardwick on bass and alto, Sonny Greer on drums and Elmer Snowden on banjo—but the real break came in 1927. "You know, I'm lucky," says Duke. "I'm lucky because I like pretty music—some people don't—and can write it down. And I was lucky when we auditioned for the Cotton Club job. Six other bands auditioned, and they were all on time. We were late, but the big boss was late too, and he heard us and he never heard the others." Duke enlarged his band to eleven pieces and stayed at the Cotton Club on Harlem's Lenox Avenue for five years.
As soon as he got on his feet, Duke sent for his mother. "I was never out of her sight until I was eight," he says. "She and my father even used to take me to dances and set me on the bandstand while they danced." He bought her furs and a big diamond ring, and sought her advice constantly. When he toured, she would follow him around the country. When she died, Duke wept in his sister's arms. As for his father, Duke had long since made him road manager of his band.
Every man in the early Ellington band—as in today's—was a soloist, and the music they played was unlike anything anyone had ever heard. Recalls a friend: "One time at the Cotton Club the entire brass section arose and delivered such an intricate and unbelievably integrated chorus that Eddy Duchin, who was in the audience, literally rolled on the floor under his table—in ecstasy." Says Ellington: "We didn't think of it as jazz; we thought of it as Negro music."